Help

No account yet?
Registering is free, easy, and private.
Discuss in the forum, contribute to the Encyclopedia, build your own MyAnime lists, and more.

House of 1000 Manga

Ten Cent Manga

by Shaenon K. Garrity, Jun 12th 2014

Ten Cent Manga

Indie art/music/comics publisher Picturebox closed its doors in December of last year. It was a blow to fans of out-there American comics like the Art Out of Time anthologies of bizarre vintage comic books or the work of multimedia art collective Paper Rad. But it was also a sad day for manga, because Picturebox put out some cool, bizarre stuff. Picturebox's manga line included Seiichi Hayashi's classic gekigaGold Pollen and Other Stories and The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, the first collection of bara, or gay men's manga, released in English. (A planned follow-up bara anthology, Massive, was picked up by Fantagraphics after Picturebox folded.)

Just before its demise, Picturebox launched its coolest manga project yet: Ten Cent Manga, a line of early postwar manga from the era before Osamu Tezuka changed the way everyone in Japan drew comics. I love weird old pulp manga. I love unquestionably great old manga too, like Noboru Ōshiro's wartime trilogy of graphic novels for children. But there's a gritty fascination to the less-classy stuff from the period as well, the titles that sold in manga rental shops because they were too violent or badly drawn for respectable children's magazines and often appeared in ultra-cheap formats like paperback akahon (red books). Mere weeks ago, my co-columnist Jason Thompson consigned these cheapass old manga to Manga Hell, but he was wrong! So wrong! At the very least they should be lifted to Manga Purgatory, all the better to guide us to Heaven.

During its brief existence on this plane, the Ten Cent Manga line produced two books, Osamu Tezuka's The Mysterious Underground Men and Shigeru Sugiura's Last of the Mohicans. Neither is really representative of typical early pulp manga. Last of the Mohicans is actually Sugiura's own 1970s recreation of his original (and less interesting) 1953 manga, and you can't argue that a Tezuka manga is “typical” of anything but Tezuka. But man, are they weird.

If you've read any early Tezuka, you know roughly what to expect from The Mysterious Underground Men: nonstop gung-ho action, sci-fi machinery, grimly heroic little boys in short pants, random bouts of slapstick comedy and tearjerking sentimentality, and a plot that jumps erratically from idea to idea as Tezuka keeps thinking of stuff he wants to draw. This is the oldest Tezuka manga available in English translation, so it's not surprising that in many ways it's the crudest (although Tezuka's super-early animation-style art is cute). The central plot involves an expedition through the center of the Earth via a sweet rocket car with a drill mounted in the nosecone. The explorers anger an underground civilization of termite people, whose queen bribes one of the less trustworthy members of the team (played by Ham Egg, one of Tezuka's early recurring “star system” characters) to betray humanity by blowing up buildings and sort of randomly messing with everyone.

But the manga's most interesting element is a subplot following Mimio, an intelligent humanoid rabbit created by science (because why not, is why), and his efforts to be accepted as human. Mimio is the first of many Tezuka characters to explore the nature of humanity and the plight of minorities struggling for acceptance in society, and his surprisingly somber story arc (he is, after all, a cute cartoon bunny) moved many children in 1948. The Mysterious Underground Men was one of Tezuka's earliest manga efforts, and it seems to have been the first one he was really pleased with. He called it his first true “story manga” with a unified plot and developed characters.

As pulpy as it is, The Mysterious Underground Men is a little too classy to give the reader a taste of true akahon flavor. For that, we need Last of the Mohicans. Anyone expecting a remotely accurate—or coherent—adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's novel is in for a disappointment. The hero, who looks distractingly like Bob's Big Boy, is named Hawkeye, and the action is sort of set in colonial America, but from there it's Shigeru Sugiura's happening and it freaks him out. The plot is a red-blooded Western inspired by American cowboy movies, but set in a cartoony world where characters break the fourth wall and horses and bears talk back to people. The battle scenes are half realistic carnage, half people getting bonked on the head to wacky sound effects. The constant switching between action melodrama, slapstick gags, and winking anachronistic humor creates whiplash changes in tone that make Tezuka at his wackiest look sedate.

The art is a similar jumble of styles and tones, with doodle-y cartoon characters coexisting alongside realistic, square-jawed figures painstakingly copied from American comic books. Shigeru draws lovely landscapes, just not necessarily of colonial New England, where Cooper's novel takes place. Sometimes the characters are in the American Southwest of cowboy movies, and at other times Shigeru copies panels from the classic Jesse Marsh Tarzan comic, so America suddenly sprouts lush jungles and waterfalls.

Shigeru was one of the most popular manga artists of the postwar era, and his erratic storytelling and shameless lifting from other sources are typical of the period. In the 1970s, his work was rediscovered and gained a cult following in the gekiga movement. Shigeru recreated some of his old children's manga for Mushi Comics, the publishing wing of Tezuka's animation studio, and drew weird new stuff for indie magazines and gekiga publishers. Hipsters dug his work. Last of the Mohicans was put out by the publisher of Treasure Island, a pop-culture magazine that aimed to be the Japanese Rolling Stone. It's hard to tell how much is genuine old-school pulp and how much is knowing pop-art collage. Either way, it's a trip.

Manga like Last of the Mohicans and The Mysterious Underground Men probably appeal to a limited audience of hardcore manga scholars and connoisseurs. Fortunately, Picturebox realized this and released both in handsome hardcover editions packed with bonus information. The Mysterious Underground Men carefully reproduces the look of the manga as originally published (in color!). Both books include essays by the manga-ka; Tezuka's is on the history of Underground Men, while Shigeru's is on his favorite silent pulp movies. Comics historian Ryan Holmberg provides a lengthy essay on each manga, including an exhaustive breakdown of all the material Tezuka and Shigeru ripped off. (Tezuka lifted from Flash Gordon serials, Milt Gross's early graphic novel He Done Her Wrong, and a German novel called Tunnel—his manga is even still called Tunnel on its title page—while Shigeru was lifting from artists like Alex Toth left and right.)

Okay, these manga are not for everyone. Some people will look at them and give thanks that eventually Tezuka invented Astro Boy and manga artists stopped trying to draw clumsy pastiches of American comic strips and low-budget movies. But strange, forgotten old manga are my Kryptonite, and when some bold publisher puts out a nifty edition with tons of historical background to explain what the hell was going on in the manga-ka's mind when he came up with humanoid rabbits or Mohicans in the jungle, I can't resist. I'm only sorry Picturebox didn't get the chance to continue the line, because even at $24.95 a pop, Ten Cent Manga is a bargain.

Shaenon K. Garrity is an award-winning cartoonist best known for the webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse. Her prose fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and Daily Science Fiction. Her writing on comics appears regularly in The Comics Journal and Otaku USA. She lives in Berkeley with two birds, a cat, and a man.

This brain-meltingly stupid kids' show has been a punchline on This Week in Anime since it started, but was there secretly a method to Heybot's madness in the end?― It's been a go-to punchline on This Week in Anime since the column began, but now that Heybot! has ended, just what the hey was this series anyway, and why was it so incredibly weird? This week in anime, Micchy and Steve put this bizarre...

Several changes have been made to this fighting game's new installment, but not all of them are for the better. Dustin Bailey gets into it.― The new story mode in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite has all the characters trapped in a pair of worlds awkwardly smashed together out of pieces from their respective universes. Marvel's AIM laboratories host not only MODOK, but also the BOWs of Resident Evil, smu...

Want to get into the hit whodunnit game series but don't know where to start? Heidi Kemps' (spoiler-free) overview of all the franchise's biggest titles has you covered.― Where to start with this murderous series? Don't despair -- our guide will help! Danganronpa is something you've probably heard of if you follow anime or video games. What began as an under-the-radar visual novel series has blossom...

To call the end of Danganronpa "shocking" would be an understatement! Jacob Chapman takes on the controversial final chapter in this SPOILER-FREE review.― Prior to the release of this (second?) conclusion to the main Danganronpa trilogy, series creator Kazutaka Kodaka was emphatic in several interviews that this "new semester" would be completely open to newcomers. While it would bring closure to th...

Why is something as risqué as S&M such an easy go-to for comedy even in family-friendly anime? Justin Sevakis has the answers.― Brandi asked: what is up with anime and the S&M fetish? I'm not talking about hentai. It mostly comes out in the form of one of the men on the show turning out to be some kind of over the top masochist. I've seen this joke over an over again. Most recently in D-Frag! and i...

Gabriella Ekens revisits the classic shojo romcom on blu-ray, and Paul Jensen breaks down this week's huge heap of new releases!― We've got a pretty wide variety of new releases this week, which means we also have a whole lot of options to explore. Let's jump right into it! Welcome to Shelf Life. Jump to this week's review: Fruits Basket On Shelves This Week Crusher Joe - OVA Collection DVD Discote...

This adaptation of the award-winning manga about karuta is finally available to own in a fancy special edition box! Bamboo Dong explores just what makes this series so special.― On paper, Chihayafuru would probably be considered a sports anime. The characters spend most of their time training for, talking about, and playing sports. And most of the action and tension revolve around the outcome of spo...

Ohba and Obata's newest manga thriller expands its cast and slips into a comfortable rhythm for its second volume. Nick Creamer dives in.― Platinum End's first volume established a cheekily cynical platform for a thriller. Opening with our suicidal hero Mirai, it proposed a scenario where twelve human candidates for godhood would have to fight it out, each of them blessed with some mix of angelic po...

When a manga's art is too complex to animate or a series has been on the air for a long time, artistic changes are bound to arise. Here are seven of the most striking shifts in a character's style.― The transition from manga to anime isn't always a seamless process. Projects hire character designers to reinterpret static artwork into something that can be animated in a manageable way. This can mean...

This isekai adventure takes a turn for the slimy as its protagonist enters a fantasy world in perhaps the worst form possible. Theron Martin has the details.― Isekai stories are pervasive in the Japanese light novel market these days, and stories where the world-jumping involves reincarnation with mind and memories intact are swiftly becoming more popular. We've already seen some odd twists on that ...